...In its light, human history, for the first time, becomes intelligible, and human behaviour understandable as never before. This radical transformation in human understanding - which has come to a peak in the mid 1990's - I shall call "the new evolutionary enlightenment" . I confidently predict that, because it is based on fully tested scientific knowledge, it will far outshine the enlightenment of the 18th century.
-Derek Freeman-

Like other primates, but with a big difference. Other primates integrate conceptual structures in rudimentary ways. We integrate them in both rudimentary and advanced ways. We can integrate them even when they clash in core structure, such as causal, temporal, spatial, modal, and aspectual structure. Our advanced form of conceptual integration, called "double-scope blending,” is the big difference: it gives human beings the capacity for higher-order cognition and behaviors: art, music, religion, language, mathematical insight, scientific discovery, culture, fashion, advanced social cognition, advanced tool use, sign systems. Other animals are for the most part restricted cognitively to a local scale. But human beings, thanks to double-scope blending, can anchor vast networks of conceptual arrays in human-scale blends. We use those human-scale blends as platforms from which to understand, manipulate, grasp, and work on these networks. Human beings can think at network scale, which is much larger than human scale.

2. What is the deep meaning of art?

Double-scope blending is a species-wide mental ability that makes culture possible. Art is at once a great flowering of that species-wide ability and a remarkable demonstration of how it endows us with the capacity to evolve culturally, that is, in cultural time rather than evolutionary time. There is no evidence as yet that basic human mental operations have evolved during the last fifty thousand years or so, but during that time almost everything we regard as marking our humanity has been invented, art often leading the way.

3. What is language? How did it arise? How did it evolve?

Gilles Fauconnier and I provide our answers to these questions in chapter nine of The Way We Think. The evolution of double-scope blending solved the central problem of language and made it possible for our species to advance far beyond the sorts of impressive communication we see in other species.

4. What are our cognitive limits when we think about economic or political questions? Is there any possibility to find in them some universally accepted truth?

Our cognitive limits in thinking about anything are severe. The human brain operates at a basic, local, human scale except that our capacity for double-scope blending allows us to understand vast conceptual networks by anchoring them in human-scale blends. The indispensability of human-scale blends is a strong constraint on thought. There are many aspects of our thinking about political and economic decision-making that should be universally accepted, such as that a self is variable, and that a self at any moment knows that it is subject to variation and takes defensive and offensive actions against its past and future versions. These basic truths from cognitive science are papered-over by classical economics, which assumes a constant self, in the form of a utility function. But a self is a complicated and dynamic outcome of complicated conceptual integration networks.

5. In which sense is language metaphoric?

Words do not mean. Expressions do not mean. Terms do not refer. Language is a system of tiny prompts for guiding listeners to construct elaborate meanings. We use the small toolbox of language to prompt others, and ourselves, to activate mental operations we already possess to work on things we mostly already know. Sometimes, we construct a conceptual integration network that contains a metaphoric link. Double-scope blending makes both language and metaphor possible.

6. What is the meaning of the meaning?

It might seem obvious that life and its events should have meaning for human beings and some other animals, but how we experience the world as meaningful and even have consciousness of some of that meaning is a question on which there is no scientific consensus. The most promising current approach derives from the hypothesis of “embodied cognition”: the brain is built to run the body, and some of those bodily states are directly meaningful, providing a basis for constructing further meaning. Antonio Damasio has taken this question up in The Feeling of What Happens.

7. What are you now working on? What is your highest scientific challenge? What is the mystery you would dream to unveil?

How do we make ourselves human? We were not so much created by evolution as we were endowed by evolution with the mental operations we need to make ourselves human. Human beings have amazing cognitive freedom but also severe cognitive constraints. The constraints make the freedom manageable. What are the mental operations that make us human, and how have we deployed them to constitute culture? This is the great scientific question of our age.

Sarah B. Hrdy. American anthropologist and primatologist who has made several major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.

"Recommendation of Javier Moreno, Germanico: Senor Moreno interviewed me on line for his compilation the New Evolutionary Enlightenment.I found his questions both intelligent and penetrating. I enjoyed answering them and being caused to think in depth about serious and sometimes fundamental matters. He has considerable talent in an area in which interviewers are prone to be lamentably superficial".

John Postgate, Profesor Emérito de Microbiología.de la Universidad de Sussex.

“Javier is editor of "The new Evolutionary Enlightenment" (http://ilevolucionista.blogspot.com), which is a blog concerned with the science and philosophy of Mind. His many interviews with leading researchers in this field provide valuable insights into current thinking about Mind.”

“Javier interviewed me as Editor of La Nueva Ilustración Evolucionista in a most knowledgable yet empathic way. I was well pleased with the result and consider that his on line site speaks for itself with so many excellent, highly readable and pertinent interviews. I can thoroughly recommend him".

“Javier interviewed me for his website http://www.ilevolucionista.blogspot.com/ in 2009. He has built up an impressive collection of interviews there with almost every key thinker in evolutionary psychology. This in itself is testimony to his professionalism, dedication, and intellectual curiosity".

Dylan Evans, Lecturer in Behavioural Science, University College Cork.

“Javier Moreno, aka "Germanico," has performed an important service in making the work of scholars and writers in the field of evolutionary biology and allied fields accessible to the wider interantional public by designing and curating the website La Nueva Ilustración Evolucionista / The New Evolutionary Enlightenment. From my own experience as one of the participants and a reader of dozens of other entries, I can attest that the interviews are conducted in a penetrating fashion with the objective of extracting the most distinctive aspects of each writer's work, the translations (between English and Spanish as required) are done in a careful and lucid fashion, and the physical production is of a high aesthetic quality. In my opinion, Javier has made an original and useful contribution to world culture".

Stuart Newman, Professor, New York Medical College.

"This website is an extraordinary labour of love, with detailed and penetrating questions to many of the leading figures in evolutionary biology. It is a tribute to the quality of the questions, and their creative online presentation, that so many notable evolutionary biologists have answered, not merely quick answers, but detailed and comprehensive essays in many cases. This is an unusual and meaningful achievement".

"One of the most interesting interview sites for the sciences of human nature, available to Spanish- and English-speakers alike".

Steven Pinker. Catedrático de Psicología en Harvard.

“Javier's website, The new Evolutionary Enlightenment, is well worth a visit. You will find interviews with all the most interesting people thinking about the evolutionary basis of human behaviour (and also C & U Frith)”.

Chris Frith, Emeritus professor of neuropsychology, University College London.

"I'd like to recommend Javier "Germanico" Moreno as en amazing person, whose intellect and passion resulted in creation of one of the most professional popular-science web services. The list of the outstanding researchers from different fields of science, who took part in his project is really impressive. I'm sure he will be able to engage himself in other activities with equal passion and professionalism".